Accurately determining demand forecasts for products are paramount concerns for retail organizations. Demand forecasts are used for inventory control, purchase planning, work force planning, and other planning needs of organizations. Inaccurate demand forecasts can result in shortages of inventory that are needed to meet current demand, which can result in lost sales and revenues for the organizations. Conversely, inventory that exceeds a current demand can adversely impact the profits of an organization. Excessive inventory of perishable goods may lead to a loss for those goods.
Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has developed a suite of analytical applications for the retail business, referred to as Teradata Demand Chain Management (DCM), that provides retailers with the tools they need for product demand forecasting, planning and replenishment. Teradata Demand Chain Management assists retailers in accurately forecasting product sales at the store/SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) level to ensure high customer service levels are met, and inventory stock at the store level is optimized and automatically replenished. Teradata DCM helps retailers anticipate increased demand for products and plan for customer promotions by providing the tools to do effective product forecasting through a responsive supply chain.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, the Teradata Demand Chain Management analytical application suite 101 is shown to be part of a data warehouse solution for the retail industries built upon NCR Corportion's Teradata Data Warehouse 103, using a Teradata Retail Logical Data Model (RLDM) 105. The key modules contained within the Teradata Demand Chain Management application suite 101, are:
Contribution: Contribution module 111 provides an automatic categorization of SKUs, merchandise categories and locations based on their contribution to the success of the business. These rankings are used by the replenishment system to ensure the service levels, replenishment rules and space allocation are constantly favoring those items preferred by the customer.
Seasonal Profile: The Seasonal Profile module 112 automatically calculates seasonal selling patterns at all levels of merchandise and location. This module draws on historical sales data to automatically create seasonal models for groups of items with similar seasonal patterns. The model might contain the effects of promotions, markdowns, and items with different seasonal tendencies.
Demand Forecasting: The Demand Forecasting module 113 provides store/SKU level forecasting that responds to unique local customer demand. This module considers both an item's seasonality and its rate of sales (sales trend) to generate an accurate forecast. The module continually compares historical and current demand data and utilizes several methods to determine the best product demand forecast.
Promotions Management: The Promotions Management module 114 automatically calculates the precise additional stock needed to meet demand resulting from promotional activity.
Automated Replenishment: Automated Replenishment module 115 provides the retailer with the ability to manage replenishment both at the distribution center and the store levels. The module provides suggested order quantities based on business policies, service levels, forecast error, risk stock, review times, and lead times.
Time Phased Replenishment: Time Phased Replenishment module 116 Provides a weekly long-range order forecast that can be shared with vendors to facilitate collaborative planning and order execution. Logistical and ordering constraints such as lead times, review times, service-level targets, min/max shelf levels, etc. can be simulated to improve the synchronization of ordering with individual store requirements.
Allocation: The Allocation module 115 uses intelligent forecasting methods to manage pre-allocation, purchase order and distribution center on-hand allocation.
Load Builder: Load Builder module 118 optimizes the inventory deliveries coming from the distribution centers (DCs) and going to the retailer's stores. It enables the retailer to review and optimize planned loads.
Capacity Planning: Capacity Planning module 119 looks at the available throughput of a retailer's supply chain to identify when available capacity will be exceeded.
Promotional demand forecasting is an important part of the Teradata Demand Chain Management (DCM) application suite described above. The accuracy of forecasts provided by the DCM application essentially relies on the calculation and utilization of promotional uplift coefficients to increase demand forecasts during the promotional activities. Currently promotional uplift coefficients are calculated by the Automatic Event Uplift (AEU) module, which is the core of the DCM Promotions Management module 114. AEU determines the expected regular sales for products using historical data, and then calculates a promotional uplift as the average ratio of the historical promotional demand over the revised demand. However, this method of computing promotional uplift coefficients does not account for the dispersion of the historical data, or the difference in the number of data points in a product class level.
The discussion which follows introduces a new and useful methodology that employs information about the data dispersion and the number of data samples in a product class hierarchy to dynamically determine the optimal level at which to compute the promotional uplift. The methodology calculates confidence values for promotional uplift coefficients for products at each level in a merchandise product hierarchy, and uses the confidence values as a filter to determine the optimal level for promotional uplift aggregation.